Bruce Boyes's Blog

Community: Robotics Archives

What's hot in James' Tech Day at JavaOne

The huge projection screen at the front of the hall seemed to be a cut above what it's been in the past, in terms of brightness, color gamut, and resolution. When will I be able to turn the wall in front of my desk into a giant display? Sun Labs showed me a demo some months ago which mosaics several LCD projectors together to do just that. I'm ready... somehow staring at even a 20-something-inch LCD seems so quaint, really...

Siemens has a Java-enabled cell phone with serial and digital outputs, intended for OEMS to design into their own devices. It looks like a typical development board with easy access to system signals for quick protoyping. If the price is right I want one. This sort of product turns a GSM cell phone into a pluggable network-enabling functional block for hardware which can't attach to ethernet.

GE Healthcare showed some spiffy looking graphics screens of x-ray and CT data, all programmed in Java. It's nice to see that Java's graphics APIs are considered mature and rich enough for a major corporation to design a whole line of mission-critical products around them.

JSR-209 - Advanced Mobile Development - promises to make mobile devices look a lot more like standard J2SE apps with a subset of Java 2D and Swing. This includes "real" threads, I/O, and network stack. Let's face it, the resources in cell phones have come a long way since the J2ME and MIDP specs were conceived, so the hardware capability has been in the phones for a year or two. Phone color screens can now be as good as the best PDAs - in fact, in devices like the Treo, they are one and the same.

JSR1 - Real Time Java - is getting a major enhancement with 2.0, which adds things like realtime garbage collection (based on work at Lund University in Sweden). Threads which need to, can pre-empt the GC, while including provision to be sure those threads don't run out of available heap while doing so. Greg Bollella has been the real-time evangelist at Sun for the last several years. It's good to see Sun recognize the importance of real-time, industrial applications. If Java is to be truly pervasive, it can't just settle for the "80% solution" - it also needs to address the more arcane areas of the market. In reality, real-time systems are almost always connected to non- real-time systems, and you'd like to be able to use the same language and APIs across your entire multi-tier application.

The slot car contest (using real-time Java) was won by a group of German high school students.

Perrone Robotics' "Tommy" Darpa Challenge Vehicle was a big draw, the subject of a Tuesday Technical Session, and won a 2006 Duke award. The vehicle uses real time Java, running on low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, including two JStamp controllers. Paul's basic approach is "simplicity" and it works very well. They spent $60,000 on the whole project, and went from start to finish in about 10 months. This is a fraction of the time and resources spent by other teams. Tommy 2 is gearing up for the 2007 Urban Challenge. Paul is definitely a "the cup is half full" kind of guy. Sun is now officially one of the sponsors of Perrone Robotics, so Java should be a major contender in the Urban Challenge.

Sony Bails on Robots

This EETimes article implies that Sony is not capable of selling $2000 entertainment Aibo pets profitably. Sony will cut 10,000 jobs and pour more money into TVs and high-density DVDs.

So much for what many view as a robotic success story: the Aibo US$2000 electronic pets. I don't own one, so it's not clear how this dog "keeps diary with pictures and is able to read e-mail or blog content", but it's a bit surprising that a company with Sony's technical and marketing expertise (rootkits aside) could not make a go of entertainment robots.

It's always dangerous to draw general conclusions from a specific incident, so I won't. Other successes remain: the useful Roomba floor sweeper and the Wowee remote control toys, each of which have sold over 1 million.

Anyone with some specific insights into why Sony is giving up for now?

Boy & frog invent square wheel car

This blog on ZDNET provides links to video and a press release from Global Composites and Distributed Robotics, both in NY state. Here's a PDF press release. If you want a smoother ride, here's a video of an elliptical wheel version.

The inventor, Jason Winckler can be seen here with his frog Edna. This may be the same Jason Winclker who plays soccer for Tamarac Middle School.

It's an interesting idea, but can spinning a weight around really be more efficient than driving round wheels? The inventors suggest using other forces instead of gravity; perhaps in special applications (where such a force normal to the plane of motion is available) might be very effective. All I can think of right now is the "screen door in a submarine" - where the flow of water perpendicular to the screen would provide a huge force which is easily tapped. So there you have it - the basic concept for a novel submarine screen door cleaner robot. If you make a million from this idea, please send me a check.

Similar ideas have been around for a while: driving a square-wheel vehicle over a road composed of inverted catenaries, as seen here.

Steering such a vehicle is a bit complicated, since it easily interferes with the synchronization of the wheels.

And what easier way to experiment with your own version of this than with Legos(tm)!
http://news.lugnet.com/technic/?n=14950
http://news.lugnet.com/technic/?n=14970

OMG Robotics report from Burlingame

On behalf of Systronix and java.net, Bruce Boyes (that would be me) presented a proposal to standardize robotic I/O point tagging in a manner similar to the IEEE1451 STIM (Sensor-Transducer Interface Module). Systronix has developed a robotic tagging API, Java packages, and working examples. This package will soon be posted in the java.net robotics community.

It will come as no surprise that there are many ideas about what should be specified, and how. At the end of the presentations, it was proposed that we consider four different task force areas:
Middleware - with some sharing concerns about size and footprint
Component Profiles - including I/O point tagging
Service Profiles
Data Structures
(Don't ask me exactly what these mean since no is really sure.)

This feels like good progress to me, though there is nothing concrete quite yet. There is good interest among active participants, which means that there might actually be people to work on the standards committees. Based on this hopeful sign, OMG approved advancing the Robotis Domain Specific Interest Group to a Domain Task Force.

The next meeting is in Feb 2006 in Tampa, and there is still time to submit an RFI response, up until 3 weeks before the Tampa meeting. The java.net robotics community is planning to submit an RFI, based on the I/O point tagging idea, and maybe others. If you have some ideas, you are welcome to join this effort.

Vida: Art and Artificial Life Competition

We are looking for art that reflects the panorama of the possible interaction between 'synthetic' and organic life, e.g.

- Autonomous agents that shape and perhaps interpret the data-saturated environment we have in common.
- Portraits of inter-subjectivity or empathy shared between artificial entities and ourselves.
- Intelligent anthropomorphisation of the datasphere and its inhabitants.
- User-defined exploration and interaction designed to reduce fear and stimulate interest in the emerging phenomena which, by definition, are beyond our control.

Check it out at http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/english/index.html

Chip-enabled ball at 2006 World Cup soccer games?

This InfoWorld article describes how an ASIC with an integrated transmitter is suspended in the middle of the ball to survive acceleration and hard kicks. Antennas in light masts and other locations distributed around the arena collect data that is transmitted from the ball. It uses the 2.4 GHz frequency range, and the developers are battling how to prevent interference with WiFi, among other things...

Similar chips have been designed to insert into players' shin guards so that players actions and strategies can be monitored. But is this really a Good Thing? Does David Beckham really want the world to know his detailed moves? Then again, maybe such a system could have helped or hindered his recent red card appeal.

I wonder how the ball can meet official weight and mass specifications with any added electronics, without some other tradeoff?

Sounds like a useful idea for other human sports or robotic games...

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